Fifty-three and a half years.
That’s how long a study of bereaved spouses found it took to nearly completely stop feeling bad when encountering anniversaries and other reminders of their lost partners.
I read this with some bad feelings myself. If you’ve looked at any other Grieve Well posts, you know that ever since shortly after my son Brady died of suicide at age 16 in October 2016, I have been determined to overcome his loss. I have insisted that I would. I have complained bitterly about people who say, “You never get over loss of a child.”
And now this study says, “Sure! You can expect bad grief feelings to nearly disappear –- after 50 years.”
Yikes.
I’m 62 and my chances of living another 50 years are close to zero. So this study is telling me, “According to the best available evidence, you will, in fact, likely never get over loss of your son.”
Still, in addition to committing myself to recovering from grief, I’m committed to an unflinching examination of the best available evidence on grief coping. (I also never expected to reach a point I never felt bad at all about my son’s death. That would be very strange indeed. I did and do expect to get to the point where I don’t feel so horrible so much of the time. To me, that qualifies as “getting over.”)
This study is telling me, “According to the best available evidence, you will, in fact, likely never get over loss of your son.”
Anyway, gritting my teeth, I read this study carefully. And there is both good news and bad news. It’s a little disheartening, but at the same time it can help us know better what to expect as the years and decades grind by. Here’s what I found:
Taking The Long View
The study is titled, “The Time Course of Grief Reactions to Spousal Loss: Evidence From a National Probability Sample.” It appeared in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006, so it is not exactly news. Plus, the study used data collected for a much older study – more on that in a bit.
The researchers included Camille B. Wortman of Stony Brook University as well as three other academics from well-regarded institutions. Wortman in particular is a widely cited scholar who has conducted a number of influential studies.
The authors describe their purpose like this: “In sum, our overall goal was to assess how quickly and completely people adjust to the loss of their spouse and to provide guideposts validated by research data indicating what typical grieving is.” That all seems excellent and just the kind of information that interests me.
The effort produced several significant findings but the one that struck me most was: “It takes about 53 years for the frequency of anniversary reactions to nearly disappear.” By this, they mean it took that long for widows and widowers to report almost never being upset by thoughts of their lost partners. The researchers pegged this as being 90 percent symptom-free.
“It takes about 53 years for the frequency of anniversary reactions to nearly disappear.”
Note that they didn’t find people on average ever became 100 percent symptom-free. By “almost never,” they meant bereaved spouses thought about their lost partners about once a month. And, remember, this took 50 years. “Twenty years post loss, the widowed thought about their spouse once every week or 2 and had a conversation about their spouse once a month on average,” they wrote.
On a shorter time frame, “It is common for anniversary reactions to be experienced at least sometimes and at somewhat intense levels for a few hours or less for 7–8 years post loss.” It took 15 to 20 years after loss for grief feelings to get close to coming only “rarely.”
To look at it another way, here’s a graph showing how grief reactions went from “frequently” to “rarely”:
Notice again how the grieving never completely stops. After about five years, symptoms only appeared “sometimes.” But it takes much longer for them become rare and they do not decline to zero, according to this analysis.
Based on this study I could still be in for a long haul. Still, there is good news. Let’s move on to that.
Good News
The best news about this study is that, in keeping with all other grief research I’ve seen, it found that people got better with time. Not everything improved at the same rate. And some things didn’t change much no matter how long the time frame was. But, overall, time healed.
Most of the improvement happens early. By seven years after the loss, the intensity of the reactions to anniversaries and other reminders had fallen from quite intense to only somewhat intense. As the years and decades pass, the speed of improvement slows but continues.
The study, like others, found that nothing about grief got worse with time, although some things didn’t change much. For instance, the length of time someone felt bad after being reminded of a lost loved one remained pretty constant. Episodes of grieving lasted a few hours or less early on, and still tended to be about that long even after decades.
I think this finding about the duration of episodes of intense grief is worth remembering. It means that even when grief symptoms get really bad, things are likely to feel better in only a few hours.
The study, like others, found that nothing about grief got worse with time, although some things didn’t improve much or at all.
Finding meaning also didn’t get easier with time. A number of research studies have connected finding meaning in a loved one’s loss to less suffering and faster recovery. You can learn more about that in this post: Making Sense of Senseless Tragedy. Those studies have also generally found that finding meaning is not easy and that many people never make much sense of a loved one’s death.
This one further supports another previous finding, namely that if you haven’t made sense of your loss pretty early on, you probably never will. “Taken together, these findings suggest that if individuals are going to resolve the loss of their spouse, they will do so relatively soon after the loss,” the authors write.
On the plus side, the study found that feelings of happiness didn’t come less often in later years. “Respondents reported experiencing happy feelings when they thought or talked about their spouse between sometimes and often… and this level did not vary as a function of years since widowhood,” they wrote.
The two positives of loss identified in this study were increased confidence and feeling like a stronger person as a result of the experience.
The study also looked at some benefits of loss. (You can read more on this at: Finding Benefits In Loss: Not Easy, But Maybe Worth It.) The two positives of loss identified in this study were increased confidence and feeling like a stronger person.
Benefit-finding didn’t seem to be very time-dependent. About 60 percent reported benefits early after loss, and that only rose to about 70 percent even decades later.
Study Limits
This is an unusual study in several ways. One positive feature is that it’s larger than most at 761 people. Also, subjects are from a nationally representative group. That is, it’s not just people who are getting therapy for grief or participating in online survivor support groups. Those are desirable study features and increase the likelihood that the findings describe what most people can probably expect.
As previously noted, the study was published in 2006. And the data it’s based on was collected 20 years earlier. That’s highly unusual. Here’s what happened:
In 1986 for another study some researchers surveyed 3,600 Americans from a nationally representative sample. This 1986 survey wasn’t focused on bereavement grief. During interviews averaging 86 minutes researchers asked people mostly about productivity, stress and overall health. However, some questions also covered whether and when people had been widowed and how they coped.
Jump ahead 20 years. Wortman and the other grief researchers went back to that earlier study’s data and looked at the responses from people who reported spousal bereavement. That’s where they got the data for the study I’m writing about now.
It doesn’t seem likely that responses to bereavement have changed much since 1986.
Is the age of the data a problem? Not necessarily. It doesn’t seem likely that responses to bereavement have changed much since 1986.
The fact that the study was not presented to participants as a grief study may be a positive. Since they didn’t think they were being interviewed specifically about grief reactions, they might be less likely to distort responses to emphasize grief reactions.
One of the limiting factors is that they only broke the time since loss down into, at minimum, five-year chunks. The actual reporting periods were 0-5 years, 5-11 years, 11 to 21 years and 21 to 64 years after loss.
As a look at what happens over a very long time span, this study is valuable or even unique. But there’s no information about what might happen in shorter periods.
The results did not include anyone who was so profoundly affected by loss that they died, were hospitalized or couldn’t be surveyed due to illness.
The authors point out one limitation that may suggest it understates the long-term impact of loss. That is, it surveyed only people who were alive and not institutionalized or too sick to be interviewed. So results did not include anyone who was so profoundly affected by loss that they died, were hospitalized or couldn’t be surveyed due to illness.
It may also be significant that people who died more than 50 years ago must have died quite young. It’s possible that when a very young person dies, it has a bigger impact than when an older person dies. I’ll note, however, that some studies of bereaved parents have found greater impact from loss of older children, so this may not be what’s going on here.
Note also that these were self-reported grief reactions from interviews. The original researchers didn’t use standard grief assessments like those described in this post: Yes, You Can Measure Grief and Here’s How.
And the finding about increased confidence being a benefit seems likely to apply only to spousal loss. I don’t think my son’s death has made me more confident, although I can see how losing a spouse could do that.
Maybe the biggest limitation is that the study didn’t reveal anything that the survivors might have done differently to help themselves. There is nothing pointing to specific grief coping strategies here as far as I could see.
One Major Finding
I think that the most helpful finding of this study is that it is normal for bereaved people to sometimes have strong feelings even many years after loss. If you have these feelings when you encounter a reminder of your lost loved one, it doesn’t mean anything is wrong. It doesn’t mean you are not getting better.
As the authors put it in their conclusion, “Our results suggest that anniversary reactions can occur decades after the loss (albeit infrequently) and should not be pathologized.”
The most helpful finding of this study is that it is normal for bereaved people to sometimes have strong feelings even many years after loss.
Although I think this look at the decades-long grief experience is informative and helpful, I’m not suggesting that your grief or anyone’s grief will certainly follow any particular path. It’s likely that your experience will more or less track the averages. But your individual mileage may vary.
Thanks for reading, liking, commenting, sharing and subscribing to Grieve Well. If you have a long-term grief experience you’d like to share, I hope you feel welcome to do so here. And whether it’s been days or decades, I am sorry for the losses that brought each of us here. I hope you get some peace today.
Thank you for this article and your studies.
I lost my dear son, Michael almost 11 months ago. I am coming up on his birthday March 1st which is affecting me terribly. His first birthday without him. And then his anniversary date of passing away is March 23rd. I don’t know how to get through this.
I have been seeing 2 therapists in person and taking a bereavement class on line. I do yoga and meditations. Another words I am doing everything I can. And I feel awful. I don’t want to live like this. I am almost 65 and it’s daunting to think this is the rest of my life story.
I send my sympathies on the loss of your son. This should not happen to our children.
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Thanks, Amy. I am sorry for your loss. The typical experience seems to be that the approach of an anniversary is worse than the actual day of the anniversary. I would not be surprised if March 1 and March 23 turn out to be less awful than you expect. The run-up to those dates is likely to be the worst part. My late son Brady’s 19th birthday will be March 13 and I expect it will be challenging but easier than the last two. It sounds like you are working very hard to try to feel better and I personally believe that grief tends to yield to well-focused, persistent effort. I imagine you are on the way to feeling better as soon as is possible. If there’s one message that I think the research imparts and that I’m trying to impart, it’s that most of us can probably expect to eventually feel much better, almost like our old selves. Unless you are unusual, this is not going to be the rest of your life story. I am interested in the two therapists. Why two? What kind of therapy are they doing? Can you share? Thanks much for reading and commenting and participating in the conversation. I hope you get some peace today.
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You’re doing a service for people who are grieving. I lost my husband 1 1/2 years ago after a short illness. The first year I was in such shock I was basically a zombie, and now another level of pain is setting in, starting at about a year. My friend lost her husband about 5 years ago, and when I told her I was pretty sure I’d never get over this, she agreed. She said, “on top of that, I don’t even WANT to get over it.” That moment was the happiest I’ve been since the loss. I don’t want to get over it, either! I will handle all the human “stuff” and enjoy life as much as possible, but as far as I’m concerned we’re still married and still in love. I may learn to live with the reality a bit better, but getting over it seems out of the question. Otherwise, I would remain in zombie land!
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Thanks, Lauren. I am so sorry for your loss. I think a lot of bereaved people do not want to feel better. I can relate to this. It seems like I might be disrespecting Brady if I don’t grieve forever. What I have realized, however, is that if I had been the one to die and he had been the one to live, there is no way I would want him to be sad for the rest of his life. I’d want him to remember me fondly and enjoy his life to the fullest. And how can I expect less of myself? It’s far from easy to live up to this, but I’m doing my best. Thanks again for reading and and participating. I hope you get some peace today.
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I set out to think this read would be disheartening, but was happy to find some uplifting paragraphs. I appreciate, specifically, reading that grief does not change much in intensity as the years pass on. I guess I’ve been worried that if things get any worse, I wouldn’t know how to keep going. Thank you for this – like Lauren writes above, you do great service for those grieving. To me, you do a great service for those looking to approach grief constructively.
To comment more on the evidence: I am guessing that the evidence that grief does not get much worse presumes one is over the “shock phase”. In this phase, one’s grief – I think – will typically be less severe as one has not entirely taken in the loss. Sometimes I wonder whether this is the case for me, so that I have yet to experience the more severe feelings of grief. If this is the case, I can’t yet take much solace that episodes and feelings of grief will not change much over time – could be I don’t know what my true “reference point” is yet. But as it probably isn’t a good idea to wait for, or anticipate, the phase ensuing the “shock phase” so as to establish the max of how intense episodes and feelings of grief are now, and in turn, how much less they could be over time, I won’t push it. Stress, as a whole, is not beneficial in grieving 🙂
Thanks again, Mark.
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Thanks, Benny. I have never seen a study that didn’t find the intensity and length and frequency of people’s grief symptoms got weaker and shorter and less common over time. As you point out, there is a phase early on where it does get worse. But this happens about four to six months after loss, according to one study I saw. After that, for most of us, it’s going to slowly and gradually get better with time. Of course, these are averages and you may not have the average experience. No guarantees. But most likely you are through the shock phase and now symptoms will get better. I hope you get some peace today. Thanks again.
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Thank you, Mark. My 27 year old daughter died 2 yrs 4 months ago due to an opiod overdose. I miss her every day. I am having more difficulty with her loss lately. As you said, time passes and it becomes longer since you have seen your lost one, talked to them. Also, I keep my grief more to myself, feeling like I don’t want to always be negative to my dear friends. I do agree with the finding that when very difficult feelings come, they will pass in a few hours. Crying is a good release of the energy that builds from suppressing the grief that plays in the background of my mind. This was another helpful article.
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You are welcome, Glynn, and I’m sorry for your loss. I keep meaning to write a post about why time seems to heal. It appears to be mostly driven by something called focalism. That’s the tendency to gradually become more focused on what’s in front of us than on what’s behind us. Many bereaved people, myself included, are of two minds about focusing less on our lost loved ones. We want less agony, but we don’t want to forget. I think these studies potentially can ease our minds about the real risk of forgetting. It’s just not likely that will happen. Perhaps this understanding can free us to turn more toward the present and what we have than on the past and what we have lost. I hope you get some peace today.
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Thanks, again, Mark.
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Through fragilities we reach one another.
Leonardo’s definition of an arch:
“Two weaknesses that fall together to become a strength.”
If we never fell, those meant to catch us might never discover their power.
Around our body-islands, identity’s ocean swirls,
wave upon wave of infinite information
tugged into fury by our negligence.
Death is not a drought of moment—but a flood of eternity.
Dear Mark,
Grateful to stumble across your site in late at night (3am) Prague. Lost my brother to suicide over twenty-five years ago; other losses, even the deaths of loves (which still constitute enormous abysses of former self/selves), still haunt me. Never (till your site) had heard of the Grief Intensity Scale, and several other significant arenas of grief study. Thank you. Already subscribed and recommended your site to a friend who was recently widowed.
Surprised that no comment I’ve seen shouts back with formidable echo: MARK, YOU WOUNDED HEALER, I HOPE YOU GET SOME PEACE TODAY.
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Thanks, Lucien. I am sorry for your losses. It’s been a difficult summer here, mostly I think because of the pandemic-related social distancing. I suspect a lot of other grieving people are having similar experiences. I was very pleased to read your comment, however. Your poetic evocations of the grief experience are powerful, and your compliments are much appreciated. Helping other people find ways to cope is what I’m trying to do here, so it’s gratifying when it happens. I’m having about as much peace as usual, I guess, and still hoping for better days soon. I hope you too have a peaceful day. Thanks again. Mark
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